Trump Administration Issues Flawed Plan for Bears Ears National Monument Lands Despite Active Litigation and Overwhelming Opposition

MOAB, UT - The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) continues to move forward a plan for Bears Ears National Monument that completely ignores the more than one million acres removed by an unlawful Executive Order and leaves most of the culturally and scientifically significant lands unprotected. In a final plan released today, the BLM proposes to manage even the remaining fifteen percent of Bears Ears National Monument in a way that doesn’t sufficiently protect cultural resources and sacred sites, leaving them more vulnerable to destruction than ever before.

Just as numerous reports have shown that the reductions were in fact focused on drilling and mining, this proposed plan shows that the BLM misled the public when claiming that a reduced boundary would allow them to better manage and protect what they considered to be the most important landmarks, structures, and other objects of historic, prehistoric and scientific interest in the Bears Ears region.

The planning process was started under former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke despite protests from Congress, and newly appointed Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has continued to ignore calls by Congress to halt planning while also disregarding active litigation challenging the Trump administration’s initial executive action.

Secretary Zinke claimed in a monuments review interim report that a reduced boundary would allow the agency to “concentrate preservation resources,” and in his final report to President Trump, he claimed to be concerned that “that increased visitation can threaten the objects…monuments that span up to a million acres or more are difficult to protect.” This final management plan proves that this was never about resources or practical ability to protect sites, but about a concerted effort to remove protections at every opportunity.

The nearly final plan released by the BLM fails in a number of ways:

• Protection of cultural resources is the primary reason for Bears Ears monument designation. However, the plan chooses several management actions that would have significant impacts on cultural resources. The agencies highlight that they seek to protect identified cultural sites, but the vast majority of the monument has not yet been surveyed for cultural resources.

• Bears Ears is home to world-class recreation opportunities. These opportunities should be preserved, but also managed so they don’t impact monument resources like cultural and paleontological sites. A Recreation Area Management Plan is scheduled to be implemented 3 years after the cultural resource management plan is put in place, meaning it will likely be at least 5 years from the final decision—a timeframe that would result in damage and degradation.

• Bears Ears is home to some of the most unique paleontological resources in the world. Under the agencies’ preferred plan, surface-disturbing activities—including rights-of-way and potential new off-road vehicle routes—would be allowed in areas with high potential for yielding fossils, and fossil-bearing areas that are currently protected would be opened to development. The agencies’ plan provides few restrictions on camping, target shooting, hiking and biking around paleontological resources. Moreover, under the agencies’ preferred plan monitoring would only take place annually and only loss of or damage to significant fossil resources would trigger mitigation measures. This would violate federal law as Section 6302 of the PRPA requires agencies to conduct surveys regardless of the potential impact to fossils from other uses.

Quotes from local, national, and scientific organizations:

Theresa Pierno, President and CEO for National Parks Conservation Association: “This management plan is an insult to the public, who overwhelmingly spoke out in favor of protecting Bears Ears— and all our national monuments. Today’s plan opens the monument to damaging uses that carelessly put sacred spaces, adjacent national park landscapes and troves of scientific resources in jeopardy. Our parks don’t exist in isolation, and the administration’s plan ignores the long-recognized threats to parks from harmful activities outside their borders, putting at risk their air and water quality, dark night skies and expansive viewsheds, as well as the multimillion-dollar economy they support. The only management plan acceptable is one that encompasses Bears Ears’ entire landscape and protects the values and resources for which the monument was originally and legally created.”

Neal Clark, Wildlands Program Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance: “As though reducing Bears Ears National Monument by nearly 85% wasn’t damaging enough, now the BLM’s plan ignores the concerns of Tribes, archaeologists, conservationists, and the vast majority of the public by rolling back protections of the remaining 15%, creating a monument in name only. This plan means that one of America’s richest cultural landscapes continues to lack the protections it deserves.”

Phil Hanceford, Director of Agency Policy & Planning, The Wilderness Society: “The BLM is moving rapidly with limited public input towards their goal of stripping protections from some of the nation’s most treasured and sensitive lands. The Bears Ears region continues to be threatened by the hasty, illegal, and un-scientific effort by a few to open as much of our public lands to drilling and mining as possible. People should be outraged.”

Brian Sybert, Executive Director, Conservation Lands Foundation: “This rushed and reckless plan ignores Tribes tied to this sacred and irreplaceable cultural landscape. It also ignores the majority of Westerners who opposed slashing its size and who understand the value our public lands hold for recreation, science and rural economies that depend on them for the long-term. It puts to rest any argument about the administration’s real motives in rolling back protections for Bears Ears and millions of other acres in the West: they are opening the door to development for their friends in industry–no matter the price for everyone else.”

Tim Peterson, Cultural Landscapes Program Director, Grand Canyon Trust: “National monuments are meant to protect our shared history and heritage while leaving a legacy for future generations. The Trump administration not only defiled our shared history by unlawfully reducing Bears Ears, they’re showing contempt for our legacy by choosing at every turn in their proposed plan to give protection short-shrift. The way in which they’ve added the insult of this detestable plan to the injury of slashing Bears Ears is deeply disturbing, and it cannot stand.”

P. David Polly, Immediate Past President, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology: “To further his own political ends, Trump cut out most of the fossil sites for which Bears Ears was created, a loss to science and a loss every American. He did not have the authority to make the cuts and the management plans must be rewritten to protect the entire monument. They should be suspended until the courts have ruled on the boundaries like Congress itself has requested.”

Rose Marcario, CEO and President, Patagonia: “The Executive Order abolishing Bears Ears was illegal and no management plan for these lands should proceed until resolution of the lawsuits. The President’s effort to reduce Bears Ears’ boundaries was done at the behest of mining and oil and gas industries. And this plan is another demonstration of this administration’s preference for extractive industry profit at the expense of the American people. Bears Ears contains iconic landscapes, sacred places, and priceless artifacts and this plan puts all of them under threat. Not to mention this is a colossal waste of time because BLM will have to create a plan for the full Bears Ears as originally designated after we win the lawsuit.”

Heidi McIntosh, Managing Attorney of Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains Office: “If we win the legal fight to restore Bears Ears National Monument, this plan will just be 800 pages of wasted effort. Even in the parts of Bears Ears that President Trump left intact, he’s planning on putting destructive activities before the American public’s interests. Bears Ears is not the kind of place for chaining thousands of acres of forest or stringing up utility lines. These are wild, sweeping monument lands.”

Erik Murdock, Policy Director, Access Fund: “The Bears Ears region deserves landscape-scale protections. The reduction of Bears Ears National Monument is a direct threat to the Bears Ears landscape, traditional values and recreation opportunities. The region contains some of the best sandstone rock climbing in the world because of its rock quality and inspirational setting. Access Fund believes that an appropriate management plan should be developed after the litigation is resolved and the boundaries of the monument are reinstated.”

Colin O’Mara, President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation: “The illegal decimation of Bears Ears National Monument opens up ancestral lands of the Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni to development that will likely degrade critical wildlife habitat, fragment migration corridors, and potentially expose southern Utah communities to unacceptable pollution and health risks. Now the management plan for the meager remnants of the original monument simply pours salt in the open wounds of the tens of thousands of tribal leaders and citizens who fought for decades to conserve these sacred lands.”

Katherine Malone-France, Chief Preservation Officer, National Trust for Historic Preservation: “This monument management plan is fundamentally flawed and premature. The National Trust and other plaintiffs are actively challenging President Trump’s unprecedented rollback of the monument’s land area by 85 percent. The plan should not be finalized before the litigation is complete. Given that the plan only considers the management needs of the much smaller—and currently contested—footprint, it is not a credible document. The plan also falls far short of providing a framework for proper stewardship of a landscape that holds deep significance for multiple tribes. It completely lacks appropriate measures to ensure protection of the significant cultural and historic resources that prompted the national monument designation in the first place and appears to leave the resources with even less protection than they had before the monument was designated. We will continue to push for the restoration of the Bears Ears National Monument to its original boundaries, and for a comprehensive management plan that truly protects the resources on the land that tell the stories of more than 12,000 years of human history.”

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